Why did Microsoft buy LinkedIn?

James Henderson |
June 15, 2016

Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn is an acquisition of professional convenience.

With regards to social selling, a concept LinkedIn has been focused on for a few years through its sales navigator tool, the acquisition provides a wider platform to provide business intelligence to sales people, thus enabling them to take selling to social selling.

“It means being able to identify exactly the right prospect by virtue of leveraging data flowing through LinkedIn on a proprietary basis,” he said.

“It’s connecting with that prospect, turning cold calls into warm prospects by virtue of leveraging your network to get the introduction, which can make all the difference in the world.

“It’s tapping an understanding of who that prospect is to best engage with them and reach out to them and all of this is done in service of greater sales efficacy and closing the deal. Now we’ll be able to take that business intelligence tool, sales navigator, deeply integrate that into Dynamics and CRM and we believe we can change the game that way.”

In turning to organisational insights and transformation, Weiner told analysts that LinkedIn possesses “arguably the most unique and proprietary set of insights in the world of recruiting.”

“As a result of that we’ve been able to transform and disrupt the way recruiting works, specifically able to scale what we call passive candidate recruiting, which has disrupted the industry in a significant way,” he claimed.

“We are also able to provide insights to customers and a show stopper historically has been what we call talent inflow and outflow.

"So you’ll sit down with a company and their executive team, the CEO, at an executive briefing and we’ll show them where their talent is going to, in terms of the competition, where the talent is coming from.”

Looking ahead, Nadella said plans are already in place to use the Microsoft field and distribution channel to scale the LinkedIn business, in a move to reach more audiences and customers.

“We have a scaled cloud infrastructure; we fully expect LinkedIn to be able to use that stack,” he added.